“After they stole my truck, I was forced to sleep in a park.”

-Everett

Torts Law

Thanks to a weak system of enforcement, property rights for the poor are frequently ignored. We’ve seen landlords, relatives, and even the government steal or destroy everything an individual owns – and yet the victim is still unable to get help or compensation. If lawyers were available to everyone, we could ensure that all households in San Francisco – rich and poor – could enforce their property rights and have a fair chance to improve their livelihood.

Featured Story: Everett Wilson

Everett is a homeless man who lived in a van. One day, the police came and illegally towed the vehicle – they claimed he did not have vehicle registration when in fact he did. When he showed them the current DMV registration they replied that it was properly a forged document. The van was sold at public auction, his personal property was destroyed, and he was sent a bill by the towing company for $4,000.

Understanding the Issue

Property Destruction

Virtually nobody will help an individual whose dispossessed of property worth $10,000 or less, even if it’s their entire life savings. We’ve seen landlords seize and destroy, without any notice, their tenant’s entire personal property. We’ve seen the government seize someone’s entire life savings without ever opening a criminal case.

Personal injury

Poor households by definition have less earning potential, which means they get much smaller damages when they are injured. For an identical injury, a middle-class person might receive several tens of thousands of dollars, while a poor person would receive a few thousand at most. The small damages available to poor people means that almost no private attorneys will help them, and almost no legal aid nonprofits will help either. This means that when poor people are injured, they have to fend for themselves.

Philip Green

Belinda Liu

Sil Liapis

Elder Law Attorney

(415) 610-5991
sil@opendoorlegal.org

Hannah Wischnia

Engagement Associate

(415) 906-0578
hannah@opendoorlegal.org

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Our Story

Our organization started when we realized that it was in fact possible to ensure universal access to civil representation for everyone. For years, we had watched existing legal aid nonprofits turn away more people than they helped. We had seen the government grossly underfund legal aid and attach ever-more restrictions on who could be helped. We had witnessed the private sector invest atrociously little of its accumulated wealth into legal aid.

The result of this is predictable: legal aid has become the least resourced social need in the United States. Most low and moderate-income Americans can’t get help, and as a result can’t properly enforce their rights.

We realized that by combining program innovations, new strategies for generating earned income, and a focus on fundraising from the general public we could create a system that solved this massive problem and guaranteed access to legal representation for everyone in a community, on every issue.

We decided to prototype this system in Bayview/Hunters Point because it was the only high-need neighborhood of San Francisco without a legal aid office in the neighborhood. In late 2012 we raised about $8,000 in seed funding from some generous private donors and decided to put our theories to the test.

We opened our doors on January 7th, 2013. In our first year, our core staff worked tirelessly on minimum wage to deliver services to dozens of clients. The heating in the office didn’t work, the furniture was rotten, and we couldn’t afford a receptionist. We had to scrounge office supplies and equipment from people we knew.

But we proved that our model could work. We never turned away someone for services who lived in the local community, and by rigorously tracking our outcomes we were able to get more and more support from people that hadn’t funded legal aid before. We tripled our budget between our first and second year and tripled it again in our third year.

We’ve come a long way since the days when we had to hand shred everything because we couldn’t afford a shredder. We’re excited by what the future can bring and look forward to growing our model out to encompass more and more people.

Our Board of Directors

We are proud to have a diverse board featuring local residents and professionals from a variety of different industries. The board is in charge of implementing the member-approved annual budget and overseeing our staff.